


Eighteen

by Alex_deMorra (Ergo_Sum)



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7897507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ergo_Sum/pseuds/Alex_deMorra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prologue to a Monty/Jake book, each can be read as a stand-alone. Comments welcome as I hope for this series to become a thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eighteen

Yoon-sung is standing outside bundled up in a military jacket and doubly wrapped scarf around his neck. His hair is different. Again. It’s long in front and really short everywhere else with blue streaks hanging over his eyes. I can barely see the contrast since it’s at the tail end of dusk where he is. Plus, it is reflecting the colors of nearby lights, making it hard to tell what’s for real. The video feed freezes again and his last words to me are, “Hang on, I’m going to…”

Then, I get disconnected.

Before that happens, he’s standing on a busy, colorful street, filled with signs of various heights and sizes, all with writing in Hangul. Or, at least I think that’s the name of language I see. It has a distinctive squared-off, squished look that strongly resembles the writing he’s shown me from books he brought from Korea. The back lit rectangles hang off buildings, extending the space by two or three feet, going from the roof all the way down to the street like translucent tabs in a notebook, are mostly in red,blue, yellow and hot pink with the writing in white or black. Someone accidentally smacks his head into one of the low hanging ones because he was texting instead of looking where he was going.

“Ttsch. They’re new here,” comments Yoon-sung in the scornful, dismissive way that I miss like fuck.

My _something_ boyfriend moved back to his native country last fall to start at Yonsei University in the Seodaemun district of Seoul. I say _something_ since I can’t call him current because he’s not here, thus making it impossible to be _together_ , and I can’t call him ‘ex’ because…I just can’t.

Yoon-sung got into several universities within the US: UC Berkeley, SUNY, Brown. Loads of them. Great ones, too. But with the 2008 stock market crash and with the partial (not full) scholarships — more from taekwondo, less from tricking, probably because they hadn’t seen the latter —he had no choice but to return to Korea. And believe me, we tried everything we could think of to keep him here.

His accent is already stronger for having been back for six or seven months.

My computer buzzes with another video chat invitation. This time, when I open the screen, Yoon-sung is standing against a brick wall; it’s darker with little background noise. There’s a street lamp close by but nothing near as bright as the thoroughfare he was standing on during our earlier call.

“I was saying,” I tease, my tongue sitting at the lower edge of my front teeth, Yoon-sung smiling at me knowingly because he knows what’s coming. Due to my apparently inferior observation skills, this is only the second year out of four possible ones that I’ve been able to say the thing I say to him next, “Happy Birthday, Yoon-sung.”

Today, we are both eighteen.

We wanted to be together and we were supposed to be together but neither of us could afford a ticket. We had even been willing to chuck our responsibilities with school to be able to do so. Well, maybe not chuck. Postpone. Delay. Work around. Adjourn. Alas, a video chat is the best we could muster.

Last year was our first birthday together. He and I had been at the same high school since I was a freshman and he was a sophomore. He _claims_ that for two years running, I had passed his locker — which was equally decked out in celebratory paraphernalia as mine — without noticing the locker, the decor, or him.

What can I say? I can be an idiot.

Last year, though, was amazing. A few weeks before my — our — birthday, dad asked me if there was anything I wanted. The only thing I could think to say was “privacy.” Then I proceeded not to think anything of it.

That is, until my birthday arrived.

It was a Friday night and dad arrived home a few hours early so that we could celebrate and have dinner with just the four of us. My parents had already given me Radevsky’s Modern Architecture Pop-Up book as well as some clothes and two bus tickets from New Paltz to Port Authority so I was thinking I’d gotten all the gifts I was going to get from them.

But, no.

Dad comes into my room on the evening of my birthday. He’s here before bedtime, knowing that I would most likely be on the phone with Yoon-sung for the rest of the night. There is this envelope in his hands and he asks me to open it. Inside is the key to the Midtown studio where he stays during the week. There is also a piece of paper with the alarm code and a card for dad’s preferred laundry service, located on the same block as the building he stays in.

The gift itself was self-explanatory but the terms and conditions of the gift were not. He instructs, “When you leave, the bed will be made with new sheets and any used sheets and towels go to the laundry service. All booze is accounted for. No spending the night. You must be home within ten minutes after the last bus gets in. Got it?”

He looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Make that two of us.

Still, though.

A day with Yoon-sung in complete and total privacy? Busting at the seams to tell him, I video-chat him right away to tell him of this latest development. Little do I expect that he’d already gotten a heads up along with his own present of a box of condoms (awkward) and a pamphlet called Safer Sex for Gay and Bisexual Men (even more awkward).

He shows me the cover. It has two cartoon guys that are smiling with their arms around each other, and beholding the sky above them as confetti falls like heavenly snow. Because, that’s exactly what it’s like. Especially for virgins. Who have never been with anyone else. Or been exposed to anyone else.

Yoon-sung opens one panel to show another guy. He’s beaming with his arms spread wide and, for some unknown reason, one leg kicking out to the side. There’s a cartoon bubble to the left of his head with the following wisdom: _If you’re not going to wrap it, go home and whack it._

Um. Yeah, ok.

Who makes up these things?

Yoon-sung, still feeling out of sorts from his earlier discussion with his mom, is a little bit green. It gets worse, though. He tells me about how his mom handed him these things. Not in a bag. Not wrapped in any way whatsoever. Just handed, two hands out, handed. Like _here you go!_

It’s a never-ending experience of awkward.

The following morning, we don’t catch the first bus (though it was tempting) because it’s leaving before five in the morning. We do catch the one leaving right after eight in the morning, getting us into the city by a quarter to ten, unlocking the door to the flat by ten straight up, and giving us thirteen straight hours of (um) privacy before needing to catch the last bus home.

The only thing weird about it, aside from all the parents knowing where we were and what we were most likely doing (the memory seared and branded as one of my most embarrassing until I die), is the wall of photos of our family and friends. Dad always keeps a ton photos down here and is forever adding to them. Recently, though, he painted the place, put the pictures in frames that looked good together, and hung them all up. It took him overa week to do it. Solid wall o’photos.

It’s nice to know that anyone coming here to visit dad would know immediately how much the family means to him.

Less nice is having hundreds of versions of your moms and dads faces staring you down while I’m in the middle of being naked with my boyfriend.

Which, yeah, of course we are.

Before that moment, we’d seen parts of each other. All the parts. But, we’d never been in a position to see everything at once. To touch everything at once. To lie down and feel his whole side against my whole side.

It was funny because when we first got there, we both rushed in the room and looked at each other knowing what we wanted to happen but not knowing how to go about it. We knew but we didn’t know. I mean this in the sense that we’d been making out for six months already but when we were there, in that space, near the bed, where no one could catch us, we both blew a fuse. We didn’t know if we should undress ourselves, undress each other, try to make it sexy, or whatever.

In the end, we were ridiculous, practically tripping over our clothes, each other, ourselves but that didn’t matter.

I still remember everything from that day. Possibly every second. But the thing I that comes to mind first from that day is how his arm looked laying on top of mine. My tan was gone so he was darker than me. He’s got this warm color to his skin, too. Mine is more blue, especially on the inside of my wrist. Our fingers were intertwined and my arm stretched out across his chest to hold his hand on the other side of his body. The same pillow held both of our heads and, though his hair was short, it was long enough to bend where it was squished against the pillowcase.

The thing that killed me was the look in his face. He really, really loved me. I totally felt it and I hope that he felt it back because I loved him, too.

I still do.

I wish he was here.

Instead, he’s six thousand, seven hundred and ninety four miles away, give or take a few, and thirteen hours ahead of me, give or take nothing. I also know happen to know that, his longitude is 37.6 degrees north and mine is 41.4. If we were on the same continent, it might not be so bad. But we’re not, so it is.

His video feed is getting darker and darker as the sun sets and even though he’s already shared a birthday dinner with his family, he’s meeting with some friends in Hongdae and he should be going.

We take too long to say good bye, repeating at least twice our wishes for the other’s happy birthday and requests to take pictures of friends and cake and presents. We finally wish each other a good night, though neither of us tells the other that we love them. It’s understood. Besides, it’s too hard to hear.

It’s highly unlikely that we’ll be in the same place at the same time anytime in the near future so trying to stay close and keep in touch probably isn’t helping either of us move on. I shouldn’t have worn his shirt to bed last night. We shouldn’t be video chatting every week. He shouldn’t be sending me photos of interesting buildings and gardens in Seoul or teaching me how to say dirty things in Korean. And, we definitely, for positive sure, definitely, definitely shouldn’t be saying all those things that start with “Hey, remember when…”

It seems I have a gift for wanting guys that no longer live here.

I mean, there’s still that other one. The one who is only an hour south of me by car. The one who’s still with blondie. The one who I’ve been playing it cool with since learning he wouldn’t be with anyone who happened to be under the age of eighteen. The one who, to my surprise, has turned out to be a pretty good friend.

Several minutes ago, my phone made the sound of horses galloping to let me know that this person — and not any other person —had sent me a text. More than one text, actually. I don’t look right away because I need to take a breath or two first.

For almost two years, I’ve shut my feelings for him down. I haven’t thought about him (much). I haven’t (really) counted on anything happening with him. Knowing that he was off limits makes it easier than I expected it to be. Plus, I had a lot of my time having my world flipped over by this badass peacock who, as I’ve just said, is too far away to consider a future with.

That said, today is the day. It’s finally here. A checkered flag is waving somewhere, opening an invisible door, releasing that previously smothered low level buzz, the vibration of a bodacious craving that is damn sick and tired of staying quiet.

I’m eighteen.

I pick up my phone and turn it back over so that I can see the screen. I unlock it, not paying attention to the preview message but noticing enough that I know the text is from him. Which I already knew because of the galloping sound.

I open the message and it makes me so happy that my heart hurts.

_J. Effing-A: I woke up thinking I forgot something about important._

_J. Effing-A: Then, I remembered what it was and realized I didn’t forget at all._

_J. Effing-A: Happy Birthday, Monkey._

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright of Alex de Morra


End file.
